Mutual exclusivity in bilingual word learning

Liittschwager and Markman (1994) have suggested that mutual exclusivity, the phenomenon in which children tend to apply new words to novel referents for which they do not know a label, is an automatic cognitive process and can only be overcome by expending additional cognitive resources. More recent work by Piccin and Blewitt (2007) suggests a different explanation, that mutual exclusivity is instead caused by conservation of cognitive resources that can be reallocated to meet situational demands (e.g., learning words in a new language) without the use of additional resources. An experiment was conducted with 35 3- and 4-year-old children to test these two hypotheses by teaching new words to children in two different conditions; in one condition children were told the target words were foreign, and in the other, that they were English. Results showed a mutual exclusivity effect in both conditions, but did not show any effect of believing the words to be from a different language. Participants in both groups had equal difficulty learning synonyms relative to nonsynonyms, supporting Liittschwager and Markman's hypothesis.